Valuing the contribution of ultra-light buyers
Ultra-light buyers, those who, on average, buy a brand once a year or less, are important by number and their contribution to brand purchase occasions. By examining over 850 brands in almost 60 categories, we identify that ultra-lights make up 62% of a brand’s buyer base over five years and contribute 32% of purchase occasions and 31% of sales volume and value. In line with previous findings, we find the prevalence of ultra-light buyers is higher for national brands than private labels, likely reflecting the higher loyalty often observed for private labels. We also find no difference in ultra-light buyers’ contribution between high and low-price brands, indicating that price is not a significant factor affecting the contribution of ultra-light buyers. Finally, we find that both growing and declining brands have fewer ultra-lights than stable brands. As growth occurs via increasing penetration and loyalty, for growing brands, new buyers may be more ‘light’ than ‘ultra-light’ in terms of their loyalty; while for declines, these findings imply that there are not enough ultra-light buyers to maintain brand sales. A failure to recruit ultra-light buyers may be very dangerous for brand health.
CitationHossain, A., Anesbury, Z., Driesener, C., Trinh, G. (2023). “Valuing the contribution of ultra-light buyers”. Forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour.
When Brands Go Dark: A Replication and Extension
The value of mass media advertising can be demonstrated by quantifying what happens when it is removed. This study does this, extending Hartnett et al. (2021), by documenting changes in market share for 365 US brands from 22 consumer goods categories that stopped advertising for at least one year. Market shares of brands without advertising declined, on average, at a steady rate year-overyear. On average, market share declines were more common and substantial among small brands and those losing share before advertising ceased. The magnitude of market share decline varied considerably across categories. Consumer goods with longer interpurchase intervals appear to suffer greater average decreases after three years without advertising. That prior findings generalize to a new market and many new categories increases confidence in the results.
CitationPhua, P., Hartnett, N., Beal, V., Trinh, G. & Kennedy, R. (2023). "When Brands Go Dark: A Replication and Extension". Journal of Advertising Research, May 2023, 2023-009
Death by 1,000 ‘true fans’: Do marketing laws apply to music listening?
The advice to musicians and marketers is to focus on what they love: a truism for practitioners is to find 1,000 “true fans” and make $100 from each of them (Kelly, 2008). If this advice is correct, we should see musicians with loyal user bases engaging more with their favourite artists and less with other music, suggesting a narrow targeting strategy would suffice. On the other hand, the established marketing laws indicate that the listeners of very different genres should overlap more than conventional wisdom would suggest, supporting the need for a much broader approach to targeting potential audiences. Given these conflicting views, musicians need to know if they should market to their existing listeners, the listeners of music similar to theirs (i.e., the same genre), or if they should try to reach a much wider audience. This study explores this.
CitationAnesbury, Z., Davies, C., Driesener, C., Page, B., Greenacre, L., Yang , S. and Bruwer, J. (2022) "Death by 1,000 ‘true fans’: Do marketing laws apply to music listening?". Forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour.
How can each brand’s buyer base buy the category at above the average rate?
An apparent anomaly in brand metrics data is that the aggregated buyer base of each brand appears to buy the category at above the average rate. This seems arithmetically impossible. The effect is real, but it has a simple explanation. It is caused by the fact that heavy category buyers buy more brands than light buyers do. They therefore appear in the buyer base of multiple brands, and so inflate the category buying rate for each brand to above the overall average rate. This study shows what it calls the ‘category purchase rate anomaly’ in empirical data, as well as demonstrating how it occurs via a simulated dataset.
CitationDawes, J. (2022) "How can each brand’s buyer base buy the category at above the average rate?". Forthcoming in the International Journal of Market Research.
How sharing of supporters reveals competition amongst non-profit brands
The traditional method of identifying non-profit competitors places those with similar objectives as forming the competitive set (looking inside out). This research provides a different perspective by looking at supporter behaviour and how this is shared across the non-profit sector (outside in). The research also applies the Duplication-of-Purchase law to a new context.
Four data sets from the US and Australia highlight that the overlap of supporters at cause-based groupings (e.g. children versus animal focused) and brand level (e.g. World Vision versus RSPCA) is largely determined by supporter numbers. This supporter-centric analytic view can highlight key competitors and potential collaborators that would be missed using the traditional inside-out perspective.
CitationFaulkner, M., Romaniuk, R., Stern, P. (2022) "How sharing of supporters reveals competition amongst non-profit brands", Forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Management.
Predicting future consumer purchases in grocery retailing with the condensed Poisson lognormal model
To identify the effect of marketing actions on consumer purchasing, analysts must disentangle the dynamic component of purchasing from expected period-to-period stochastic fluctuations. This is done by comparing marketplace observations to the conditional expectation of future purchasing. Current methods of deriving the conditional expectation contain systematic bias and rely on certain unrealistic modelling assumptions. We therefore propose a new model to predict future consumer purchases in grocery retailing. The new model is a mixture of Erlang-2, Poisson and lognormal distributions or a condensed Poisson lognormal model (CPLN). Using two grocery retailing datasets from the UK, we demonstrate that the CPLN model predicts future consumer purchases well with error of 7% and 9%, respectively. Compared with the previous benchmark model, the condensed Negative Binominal Distribution (CNBD), the CPLN model reduces error by 50% (7% versus 14%) and 67% (9% versus 27%), respectively. Theoretical and practical implications for retailers are discussed.
CitationTrinh, G. and Wright, M. (2021) "Predicting future consumer purchases in grocery retailing with the condensed Poisson lognormal model". Forthcoming in
How Websites Compete in the Middle East: the Example of Iran
Based on the analysis of two sets of data (a cross-sectional online survey of five product categories with an average sample size of 525 and a longitudinal telecommunications panel of more than two million respondents), this study detects a positive relationship between the market size (purchase penetration) of Iranian e-brands (or websites) and the percentage of customers shared with other e- brands. This finding is consistent with the well-established Duplication of Purchase Law; it also holds over time and across different markets (e.g., repertoire v. subscription). Hence, this study makes a twofold contribution to marketing knowledge. First, it expands the collection of empirical evidence concerning the Duplication of Purchase, which thus far is primarily within offline contexts and Western countries. Second, it addresses issues inherent to research on e-loyalty, such as the over emphasis on evaluating loyalty for one e-brand at a time via complex attitudinal measures.
CitationNaami, T., Anesbury, Z., Stocchi, L. and Winchester, M. (2021) "How Websites Compete in the Middle East: the Example of Iran". Forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour.
How loyalty extends across product categories
Fifty years ago, Gerald Goodhardt’s analysis of audience duplication across television programs led to the discovery of the Duplication of Viewing law. This law was then extended to describe and predict customer sharing within product categories: the Duplication of Purchase Law. Many replications and extensions documented the law-like status of this generalisation, providing important insight into how brands compete and the composition of consumers’ repertoires. In this article we build on that seminal research, using Duplication of Purchase as an analytical method to measure loyalty across categories, or, in other words, the purchasing of brand extensions. Brand extensions are commonly cited as a way to capitalise on brand equity, and when asked, respondents often report high intentions to purchase brand extensions. However, the actual cross category buying of brand extensions has not been systematically examined. In this research we analyse panel data to understand whether purchasing a brand in one category does in fact increase the likelihood of a brand being bought in a second category. The study finds that a consumer who purchases from two categories is on average 2.4 times more likely to purchase a brand extension in the second category if they had purchased the same brand in the other category. This effect is larger for brands spanning similar, or complementary categories. Therefore, for many brand extensions the cross-category loyalty effect is much more modest.
CitationGrasby, A., Mari-Corsi, A., Dawes, J., Driesener, C. and Sharp, B. (2021) "How loyalty extends across product categories". Forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour.
How persistent are Duplication of Purchase partitions?
Brands share more of their customers with bigger competitors and fewer with smaller ones. But there are occasional deviations to this predictable Duplication of Purchase (DoP) pattern. When two or more brands share excess customers because of functional or non-functional differences – it is called a partition. While past research using the NBD-Dirichlet model demonstrates partitions in annual or shorter data, there is no empirical evidence for partition persistency over the longer term, though some other NBD-Dirichlet deviations are known to persist over time. Examining expected partitions in ten consumer goods categories in the United Kingdom, the authors show partitions overwhelmingly persist over three years. The findings contribute support to Dirichlet theory, especially on market stability, boundary conditions, and provide practical implications for portfolio management.
CitationAnesbury, Z., Bennett, D., Kennedy, R. (2021) "How persistent are Duplication of Purchase partitions?". Forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour
Market share growth requires building mental and physical availability among all category buyers. However, if younger category buyers are more likely to purchase new-to-market products, then perhaps younger buyers are, relatively speaking, more important for growth. This research investigates the relationship between category buyer age, brand buyer age, and brand failure. When sub-brand buyer age is younger than category-buyer age, the sub-brand is likely to be (a) new-to-market, or (b) growing in market share. Older-than-category sub-brand-buyer age is likely for sub-brands that are (a) declining, or (b) dead. Results from 17 years (1998-2014) of UK household panel data, including 5,913 sub-brands from 101 categories, show that age skews were uncommon (only 18% of sub-brands), and secondly, that growing, stable and declining sub-brands appealed equally to all ages. Finally, we identified that new launches and dead brands tend to skew to younger consumers, suggesting that new launches need to appeal to all ages to avoid failure.
CitationAnesbury, Z., Bellman, S., Driesener, D., Page, B., & Sharp, B. (2021) "Ageism Kills Brands. Forthcoming in the Australasian Marketing Journal.
